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Wesley Geiger has spent a lot of time on the road, and his debut album dignifies the journey. Throughout the El Dorado project, Wesley divided his time between Texas and California — earning a degree in music in the Los Angeles area and working in Dallas during breaks from school. He drove his pickup the 1,500 miles between those two cities more than a dozen times, and those trips significantly influenced his songwriting. He explored the southwest, camped off the beaten path and absorbed the silence of the desert.

Gram Parsons, Joni Mitchell, Jerry Jeff Walker, Townes van Zandt and Neil Young became influences. And he got to know the art of more recent songwriters such as Ryan Adams, Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes) and Jeff Tweedy (Wilco). American authors Wendell Berry, John Steinbeck and Wallace Stegner informed his understanding of our relationships with geography and the road.

The result is El Dorado, a nine-song album that explores the distance between getting lost and being found. El Dorado was produced and mixed by Beau Patrick Bedford, primarily at a small cabin north of Dallas where Wesley and Beau escaped the noise of the city to craft an expansive sonic landscape.

At age 11, Elise Davis knew she wanted to play the guitar and began taking lessons in her hometown of Little Rock, AR. Writing songs, let alone singing them in public, was never a conscious end-goal. She knew she loved music, but there was no telling how far its pull would shape her life.

One evening, after her parents forbid her to go to a concert in downtown Little Rock, she decided to run away from home and stormed out the door.

After a few hours of sitting in a cul-de-sac less than a mile from away, she grew tired of waiting for the arrival of her anxious parents searching desperately for her. After walking back into her living room, she was shocked to find her parents just as she left them; neither Mom or Dad had realized she was missing. The ploy for attention had the opposite effect, and she was furious. Stomping up the stairs, she grabbed her guitar, locked herself in the bathroom and wrote her first song start to finish in one sitting. At 12 years old, she knew it was her calling.

The Sandbox Lizards, Elise's first band, played gigs in and around Little Rock throughout high school, and she released her first full-length album "Love And Leaving" halfway through her senior year.

She attended college at Southern Methodist University in Dallas for her first two years, but ultimately finished school at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. She released an album each year at SMU and U of A, all the while playing gigs in hotel lobbies, dive bars and parties. She released "Same Vein" in 2010 immediately after graduation and was free to travel.

She immediately booked a gig in Los Angeles at a small bar well off the beaten path. It was there that a smug bouncer struck up a conversation with a touch of sarcasm "so honey where are you from and when you moving to LA to be in the music industry?" After explaining she was from Arkansas and hadn't considered moving to LA, the bouncer squarely told here "you will never get anywhere if you stay in Arkansas, you'll never get anywhere." On her flight home the next day, she made up her mind…she was moving to Nashville.

Without any sense of a safety net, and a mere three weeks after the in-flight decision to drastically change course, she was on the interstate headed to a town where she didn't know a single living soul. Somewhat miraculously, the very week she landed in Nashville, she had arranged a group of studio musicians to record "Cheap Date," which ultimately released November of 2011.

In March of 2013, Elise signed her first publishing deal with Horipro Entertainment. The opportunity was presented as a prize for winning a songwriting contest through American Songwriter and Martin Guitar in Nashville. That win planted her firmly in the middle of the Nashville songwriting community, and she began writing songs in the spirit of co-writes and collaboration.

On May 27th of this year, Elise released the Life EP in conjunction with her publisher Horipro Entertainment. The Life EP offers a peek inside the elation and hardships of a born musician making her way in the shadow of the neon circus of downtown Nashville. While the songs on Life could take a slight right turn and fit nicely on the Music Row hit parade, there's an honesty and sharp-witted integrity fueling her creativity and constantly veering left.

The EP also encapsulates the mid-twenties turbulence stemming from the acceptance that there's no settling down in Elise's future, and it's in direct contrast with the more traditional paths in her hometown of Little Rock. It's a deft and honest exploration of a woman whose talent and drive will ultimately land her in the public eye at the sacrifice of a life that was expected of her. There's a bit of a wavering perspective on Life, one that looks at a simpler path in envy while wholeheartedly embracing the fact that there's no chance for any semblance of picket fences and wedding vows if she is to pursue her goals.

"Never Was Never Is" explores the role of men when investing in a relationship isn't an option, and "Almost A Woman" details the break-up which helped solidify the decision to keep potentially substantial relationships at an arms length on purpose. Life is not always pretty, and it doesn't quite fit with most albums coming out of Nashville because of it.

Ultimately, staying true to her message may place her beyond the periphery of country label machine, but it simultaneously allows true music fans the opportunity to focus on a songsmith destined for a different kind of limelight.

Texas-born songwriter Kirby Brown is a man who knows how it feels to lose, but not how it feels to quit. Cast against the backdrop of a tired small town America, his songs reach out for something bigger on the other side of the ordinary. A poet-laureate of the working man, his stories are told through the eyes of people that we all have known— broken down but still feeling invincible, burnt out but longing for more, waiting for a sign at a crossroads where struggle hopefully meets redemption.

On K Phillips debut American Girls, the West Texan champions the desperate, the sleazy and the broken, with small-town murals that glimpse into the jealousy of a sheriff, lovers that freeze to death and a crude lothario that misquotes dead poets. He prefers bygone rock sounds, leading his band on resonator, mouth harp, banjo, guitar, Hammond B3 and Piano, the latter being his primary tool. "The piano playing came out of necessity. I wanted to write country ballads, Motown grooves and gospel music and it's not the same on the guitar," he says, drawing from southern soul and rock as well — his heroes garnered from classic rock radio's key kings like Leon Russell, Billy Preston and Gregg Allman.

Until 2006, Phillips was content working as a sideman even though he'd been writing since grade school. But when a close friend and a love interest drowned in two separate accidents, he feared 'the rule of 3' and made a decision not to leave "with these song inside." The young startup label, Rancho Azul, approached Phillips (now living in Austin) to make an album, and his handpicked dream team of Texas musicians, including Bobby Keys of The Rolling Stones, Rick Richards of Joe Walsh and Jimmy Pettit of The Flatlanders — cutting the album live in 4 days.

Phillips is quickly drawing attention to his Texas spin on southern soul that backs lyrics that range from dark to humorous to plaintive. Though there are some desperate characters, as a writer he doesn't want to take himself too seriously. "I get a kick out of out of the ridiculous and the lighthearted, and I don't want to be afraid to be a little weird, a little fragile or a little dirty," he says. "I got that from Warren Zevon. I always loved how his songs and characters could be absurd or sardonic but at the same time achingly beautiful."